We’re back with the final Reader’s Rides for the month of February, and we’ve got quite a piece to bring you this week, with this gorgeous 1964 Chevy Nova that was sent to us by its very proud owner, Todd Buckbee. 

Buckbee, a native of Washington state, has every right to be proud of his ride, as it’s got the whole package: a stance that could kill aided by a rocker-dragging ride height, an ultra-clean paint job, and a choice of wheels that just sets the whole look off. Even with the contingency decals down the sides, which are often the difference between a clean ride and a cluttered one, this thing just looks magnificent. A man’s gotta’ make his money, and Buckbee does it right with this beautiful machine.

But when we tell you this is Buckbee’s pride and joy, we mean it. You see, Buckbee, who had never built a full chassis race car in his life, was coerced by his good friend Duane Moore to construct a full chassis for this Nova, rather than the front clip and mini tubs that he had originally planned to do. 

“I’d already decided to do the front clip and mini tubs and my friend Duane said, ‘why don’t we just build a chassis car?’ I told him he had me at chassis! So, five months after we started the build and probably 1,000 man hours of nights, weekends and just about every spare moment we had later, this is what we ended up with!”

Buckbee and Moore built the car from the ground-up, and Moore later served as the crew chief when their work of art hit the race track after its completion in April of 2011. “Duane was the crew chief throughout the entire build and did an amazing job! I couldn’t have done it with out his knowledge and help, and I have to thank him for that,” said Buckbee.

The pair constructed the chassis using a Jegster square tube chassis kit and a front clip with tubular uppers and lowers from JEG’S on a rack at friend Mike Pond’s shop. A four-link rear suspension was added, along with a Strange Engineering Dana 60 rear end housing with 4.88 gears and Aeropace brakes and shocks. The car sits on a set of Rocket Racing’s Rocket Launcher 4.5 x 15 10-spoke front wheels and Weld Racing 14 x 15 Woodward RT wheels out back, wrapped in Hoosier 32 x 14 x 15 rubber.

Buckbee and Moore stretched the car out three inches from its stock wheelbase to 113 inches overall, and set the motor back 10 full inches to help with weight transfer on the race track. All told, the car tips the scales at just 2,600 lbs., with a 1320/1280 front-to-rear weight balance.

The 600-plus horses motivating the Nova come compliments of a naturally aspirated, 406 cubic inch small block Chevrolet that’s backed by a Turbo 400 transmission shifted via a Cheetah Shifter and transferring through a 6200 RPM stall A1 torque converter.

Buckbee campaigns his immaculate ride in the Pro class at NHRA Northwest division bracket races at the Woodburn Dragstrip and Portland International Raceway in Oregon, and has laid down a best quarter-mile elapsed time of 10.07 at 131.02 MPH with a short time of 1.37. 

Buckbee and his Nova are the true embodiment of the grass roots of drag racing — a couple of gearheads with a plan and enough perseverance to pull it off, who are out having a ball bracket racing at their own pace, content to do things their way. These guys set out to do it and they accomplished it, and we’re just honored to get to show off the fruits of their labor.

Whether you’ve got a door car or a dragster, a show-winner or a clunker, we want to see your rides, and if you’d like to have your race car featured here on the digital pages of Dragzine, simply click HERE to learn how to submit your whips.